Networking issues

[Andrew Falanga]

Hello,

I have, for some time, been able to ssh into my father's FreeBSD machine in 
the Road Runner network in Central New York.  Last night, I tried so that I 
could fix a problem for him and ssh timed out.  No problem I thought, his 
modem has a different IP than the one I have in my /etc/hosts file, but this 
turned to not be the case.

Well, after some digging, I did a traceroute to his IP address.  The packets 
went all over the place, from San Jose, to Colorado, back to San Jose, to 
Colorado then to Ohio, then to Denver, then to San Jose, then to Ohio, etc. 
(you get the idea).  Eventually, traceroute was just lost and confused and I 
hit ctrl-c.  Thinking the problem would work itself out, I decided to wait 
and try again tonight however, I'm having the same problem tonight.

Obviously, though, I can use my Internet connection (after all, the 
e-mail . . .), but why can't I get to his IP address.  For kicks and grins 
tonight, I logged onto my DSL modem and looked at it's routing table.  I 
found some interesting information.

First, my DSL modems IP is 71.221.172.38, however, the default route appears 
to be 67.41.38.201.  Obviously, I've got to cross at least one network to get 
to this default route in the first place.  I'm assuming this is the default 
route because it appears in the routing table as such:

dest		netmask		gateway
0.0.0.0	0.0.0.0		67.41.38.201

Now, here's the output of traceroute (with name resolution turned off):

[/usr/home/andy]
-> traceroute -n 67.41.38.201
traceroute to 67.41.38.201 (67.41.38.201), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  67.41.38.201  40.303 ms *  39.421 ms

Why on earth would there be delays on the first hop when not using name 
resolution?

Ok, now my machines setup: my DSL modem is the router (as you all knew).  It 
also acts as a DHCP server but my FreeBSD machine is setup as static IP.  The 
local, private, IP network is 192.168.0.0/24 with the DSL modem as 
192.168.0.1 and my box is statically assigned 192.168.0.10.

Any thoughts as what might be wrong on my end before I start bugging my ISP?

Thanks,
Andy